Design Twitter (yes, it still exists, we don't talk about it) is in a mild state of chaos this week, and honestly, it's kind of delicious. The latest episode of Dezeen Weekly has people asking the question nobody in the design industry wants to answer out loud: is IKEA actually... doing it better than them?
The flatpack elephant in the room
Dezeen features editor Nat Barker and design editor Jennifer Hahn dig into IKEA's new PS collection, and the conversation reportedly lands somewhere between genuine admiration and existential dread. The PS line has always been IKEA's playground for pushing boundaries - the place where the Swedish giant lets its hair down and pretends it went to art school. But this time around, the question being asked is whether the collection is TOO good. As in, uncomfortably good. As in, independent designers might want to sit down for this one.
It's the kind of thing that makes you stare at your overpriced design-forward shelving unit and quietly wonder if you made a terrible financial decision.
Meanwhile, in Utah, someone is building something absolutely unhinged
On the complete other end of the aesthetic spectrum, Dezeen is also covering a giant data centre planned for Utah that apparently has everyone talking. And when we say giant, we mean the kind of giant that makes you reconsider the word giant entirely. In an era where AI is eating the internet and the internet is eating electricity, massive data infrastructure projects are becoming their own strange architectural genre - brutalist, functional, and completely indifferent to whether you think they're pretty.
It's the building equivalent of a guy at a party who doesn't care if you like him. Somehow that makes you like him more.
Paris being Paris, beautifully and infuriatingly
And then there's the Tour Triangle situation in Paris - a long-delayed skyscraper project that Parisians have been resisting with the particular energy that only Parisians can muster. The city that gave us the Eiffel Tower (which was also famously hated at first, let's not forget) is once again grappling with whether tall buildings have any business existing within its elegant, low-rise skyline.
The irony writes itself. The city of light, famously romantic, famously beautiful, also famously incapable of letting anything new happen without a five-year argument about it first. Relatable, honestly.
All three stories are covered in the latest Dezeen Weekly podcast, which is shaping up to be essential listening for anyone who cares about design, architecture, or just enjoys watching the design industry quietly panic about a furniture giant from Sweden.
